Fight Over Climate Aid Threatens to Derail Copenhagen Talks

Less than a week before the Copenhagen climate conference begins, confidential documents reveal that the EU is pushing to use existing aid money, not new funds, to help poorer nations reduce emissions and adapt to climate change—a stance that NGOs say could derail the entire summit.

According to documents obtained by The Guardian, EU negotiators have removed lines from a proposed draft agreement that call for a new climate fund for poor countries most vulnerable to the effects of climate change. The text says the EU “cannot accept” proposed language that would call for climate aid to be “additional to” and “separate from” other development assistance funds.

If climate funds were to come entirely from existing pools of money, that would pose a huge problem for international negotiations. The United Nations has estimated that poor countries need as much as $170 billion per year to adapt to climate change. That’s $50 billion more than developed countries spent on aid last year.

In public, Britain and Holland have argued that climate funds should be additional, while Germany, France and other smaller nations have said the money should come from existing aid. However, the Guardian also obtained an email from an official in the UK’s Department for International Development making it clear that all money pledged for climate change so far is drawn from existing programs. (Most of it is pledged via the World Bank, which doesn’t have a reputation for being all that clean when it comes to financing energy development.) This conflicts with public statements from Prime Minister Gordon Brown, who just last Friday proposed a new $10 billion global fund to help poor countries with climate change to much fanfare. As it turns out, that money, too, would also come almost entirely from other aid budgets. The United States, meanwhile, has been even less generous.

For poorer countries, financial aid is a dealbreaker issue. Developing nations—especially places like Tuvalu, the drowning island nation that Rachel Morris reported on for the current issue of Mother Jones—are demanding new, additional funds to deal with the climate problems caused by rich nations. They have called for a minimum of $400 billion each year by 2020 to help curb emissions, expand clean energy development, and adapt to climatic changes that are already occurring.

So far, rich countries have suggested they may be prepared to offer around $100 billion annually, although finance ministers failed to agree on a concrete funding scheme in a meeting earlier this month. If that sum were to be drawn from existing aid, poverty and hunger alleviation programs, public health, agriculture, and other extremely important projects would suffer. “No developing country will sign up to an agreement that could give them no extra money at all,” Oxfam senior policy adviser Rob Bailey told The Guardian. “The EU and other rich countries must provide new and additional finance, otherwise there will be no deal at all.”

Looking for news you can trust?

Subscribe to our free newsletters.

DOES IT FEEL LIKE POLITICS IS AT A BREAKING POINT?

It sure feels that way to me, and here at Mother Jones, we’ve been thinking a lot about what journalism needs to do differently, and how we can have the biggest impact.

We kept coming back to one word: corruption. Democracy and the rule of law being undermined by those with wealth and power for their own gain. So we're launching an ambitious Mother Jones Corruption Project to do deep, time-intensive reporting on systemic corruption, and asking the MoJo community to help crowdfund it.

We aim to hire, build a team, and give them the time and space needed to understand how we got here and how we might get out. We want to dig into the forces and decisions that have allowed massive conflicts of interest, influence peddling, and win-at-all-costs politics to flourish.

It's unlike anything we've done, and we have seed funding to get started, but we're looking to raise $500,000 from readers by July when we'll be making key budgeting decisions—and the more resources we have by then, the deeper we can dig. If our plan sounds good to you, please help kickstart it with a tax-deductible donation today.

Thanks for reading—whether or not you can pitch in today, or ever, I'm glad you're with us.

We Noticed You Have An Ad Blocker On.

ONE QUICK THING:
Did you see that Mother Jones is launching a new Corruption Project? Check it out, and if our plan makes sense to you, we hope you'll help us raise $500,000 and go all in.

ONE QUICK THING:
Did you see that Mother Jones is launching a new Corruption Project? Check it out, and if our plan makes sense to you, we hope you'll help us raise $500,000 and go all in.

THE MOTHER JONES CORRUPTION PROJECT
We're crowdfunding to hire and build a new beat focused on systemic corruption—investigating how democracy and the rule of law are being undermined by those with wealth and power. Read why we believe this is what the moment demands, and please help fund it with a tax-deductible donation today.

THE MOTHER JONES CORRUPTION PROJECT
We're crowdfunding to hire and build a new beat focused on systemic corruption—investigating how democracy is being undermined by those with wealth and power. Read more, and please help fund it with a tax-deductible donation today.